The brevity of the book of Ruth belies its significance. It offers an answer to some of the most important questions the people of Israel grapple with throughout the Old Testament. How are we to respond to outsiders? How should we understand and inhabit boundaries? Are we allowed to transgress them? Mona Hatoum, Güler Ates, and Ibrahim El Salahi grapple with similar questions in the contemporary context.
While its date is disputed, Ruth was written at a time of precarity. If authored before the Israelites’ sixth-century BCE experience of exile, this was because of threats to the Davidic monarchy. If post-exilic, this was because people were trying to come to terms with the profound trauma of forcible displacement.
Uncertainty and fear tend to provoke concern about identity and material resources, and an ongoing debate concerning how to respond to those defined as ‘other’ to Israel rumbles on behind this text. Who was to be included and given access to the holy places and rights to land, wealth, and power? Who should be legitimately excluded? How tightly were boundaries to be drawn between ‘us’—Israelites, the people of God—and ‘them’—the others, foreigners? Can we intermarry with outsiders or will they pollute and threaten us?
Two trajectories of response solidified over time. One urged exclusivity. We glimpse it in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, where intermarriage is condemned and foreigners are prohibited from entering the Temple. Another urged inclusivity. It encouraged care to be offered to the alien and hospitality to be showed to the stranger (e.g. Leviticus 19:33–34). It envisaged the mountain of the Lord being one to which all people and nations of the world would come and dwell together (Isaiah 55–56). The book of Ruth epitomizes this second strand.
Ruth—the book and the character—interrogates and transgresses borders. Borders create others, and Ruth is the ultimate outsider. She dwells on the wrong side of religious, cultural, and social boundaries of her time. Moab was considered to be an archenemy of Israel, as the Moabites had refused to help the people of Israel on their way to the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 23:4) and Moab was born through an incestuous relationship between Lot and his daughters (Genesis 19:36–37). Also, Ruth is a woman, and—what is more—a childless widow at a time when being barren was a sign of divine disfavour.
Hatoum’s Impenetrable evokes the stark inhospitality that outsiders like Ruth—past and present—must overcome. It is an inhospitality which eats away at the space it purports to protect even as it is projected outwards, for the barbed wire borders do not just demarcate the cube’s edges. They constitute the cube. Borders become, so to speak, all that the cube is. So too the costly navigation of—and tripping up on—hostile borders can imbue the lives of migrants long after the physical crossing of a particular nation state line is over. And this infects the lives and experience of non-migrants dwelling in these spaces too.
But Ruth transgresses boundaries to become an agent of transformation. Through bearing Obed, she brings joy to Boaz and fills Naomi’s emptiness (4:13–17) and Obed’s name, meaning serving, underlines his role in God’s salvific plan. Ruth also encourages Boaz, and through him the broader community of Israel, to enlarge his understanding of the Torah law concerning the role of the kinsman redeemer (go’el) and the inclusion of outsiders. As Bergant puts it:
[t]he strange and potentially dangerous woman has become the agent of God’s salvation … the blessing of salvation comes from without (God) not from within (ourselves). (Bergant 2003: 52, 60)
The borders so menacingly evoked in Impenetrable—the vertical barbed wires that exclude and harm those that seek to pass by, over, or through them—turn metaphorically, then, into the life-giving vertical lines of El Salahi’s TheOxford Tree. His lines connect earth and heaven, transgressing the boundary between mundane and holy, to form the haraz tree that bursts with vivacity unexpectedly when all else has dried up around it. Just as El-Salahi’s tree fuses the vegetation and colours of Sudan with Western modernism—blending cultural, national, and aesthetic categories—so Ruth’s hybridity and boundary-crossing are the source of new life for Israel. She is like the woman in Ates’s Isimsiz. Resisting being fully known by others, Ruth’s gift begins with her otherness, courage, and movement. Both The Oxford Tree and Isimsiz suggest the strength and possibility that can come from without.
While human beings in their full subjectivity are noticeably absent from the three works of art, Ruth 3–4 is full of them. Fifty-five out of eighty-five verses in Ruth are spoken conversation, which is the highest proportion of dialogue to narrative in any biblical book (Sasson 1997: 320). Human relationship and conversation is where the key work of transgression towards transformation takes place. And it is through this presence of the characters to one another that God’s presence is made manifest.
References
Bergant, Dianne. 2003. ‘Ruth: The Migrant Who Saved the People’, in Migration, Religious Experience, and Globalization, ed. by G. Campese and P. Ciallella (New York: Center for Migration Studies), pp. 49–61
Sasson, Jack. 1997. ‘Ruth’, in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. by R. Alter and F. Kermode (London: Fontana), pp. 320–28
3 Then Naʹomi her mother-in-law said to her, “My daughter, should I not seek a home for you, that it may be well with you? 2Now is not Boʹaz our kinsman, with whose maidens you were? See, he is winnowing barley tonight at the threshing floor. 3Wash therefore and anoint yourself, and put on your best clothes and go down to the threshing floor; but do not make yourself known to the man until he has finished eating and drinking. 4But when he lies down, observe the place where he lies; then, go and uncover his feet and lie down; and he will tell you what to do.” 5And she replied, “All that you say I will do.”
6 So she went down to the threshing floor and did just as her mother-in-law had told her. 7And when Boʹaz had eaten and drunk, and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of grain. Then she came softly, and uncovered his feet, and lay down. 8At midnight the man was startled, and turned over, and behold, a woman lay at his feet! 9He said, “Who are you?” And she answered, “I am Ruth, your maidservant; spread your skirt over your maidservant, for you are next of kin.” 10And he said, “May you be blessed by the Lord, my daughter; you have made this last kindness greater than the first, in that you have not gone after young men, whether poor or rich. 11And now, my daughter, do not fear, I will do for you all that you ask, for all my fellow townsmen know that you are a woman of worth. 12And now it is true that I am a near kinsman, yet there is a kinsman nearer than I. 13Remain this night, and in the morning, if he will do the part of the next of kin for you, well; let him do it; but if he is not willing to do the part of the next of kin for you, then, as the Lord lives, I will do the part of the next of kin for you. Lie down until the morning.”
14 So she lay at his feet until the morning, but arose before one could recognize another; and he said, “Let it not be known that the woman came to the threshing floor.” 15And he said, “Bring the mantle you are wearing and hold it out.” So she held it, and he measured out six measures of barley, and laid it upon her; then she went into the city. 16And when she came to her mother-in-law, she said, “How did you fare, my daughter?” Then she told her all that the man had done for her, 17saying, “These six measures of barley he gave to me, for he said, ‘You must not go back empty-handed to your mother-in-law.’ ” 18She replied, “Wait, my daughter, until you learn how the matter turns out, for the man will not rest, but will settle the matter today.”
4 And Boʹaz went up to the gate and sat down there; and behold, the next of kin, of whom Boʹaz had spoken, came by. So Boʹaz said, “Turn aside, friend; sit down here”; and he turned aside and sat down. 2And he took ten men of the elders of the city, and said, “Sit down here”; so they sat down. 3Then he said to the next of kin, “Naʹomi, who has come back from the country of Moab, is selling the parcel of land which belonged to our kinsman Elimʹelech. 4So I thought I would tell you of it, and say, Buy it in the presence of those sitting here, and in the presence of the elders of my people. If you will redeem it, redeem it; but if you will not, tell me, that I may know, for there is no one besides you to redeem it, and I come after you.” And he said, “I will redeem it.” 5Then Boʹaz said, “The day you buy the field from the hand of Naʹomi, you are also buying Ruth the Moabitess, the widow of the dead, in order to restore the name of the dead to his inheritance.” 6Then the next of kin said, “I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I impair my own inheritance. Take my right of redemption yourself, for I cannot redeem it.”
7 Now this was the custom in former times in Israel concerning redeeming and exchanging: to confirm a transaction, the one drew off his sandal and gave it to the other, and this was the manner of attesting in Israel. 8So when the next of kin said to Boʹaz, “Buy it for yourself,” he drew off his sandal. 9Then Boʹaz said to the elders and all the people, “You are witnesses this day that I have bought from the hand of Naʹomi all that belonged to Elimʹelech and all that belonged to Chilʹion and to Mahlon. 10Also Ruth the Moabitess, the widow of Mahlon, I have bought to be my wife, to perpetuate the name of the dead in his inheritance, that the name of the dead may not be cut off from among his brethren and from the gate of his native place; you are witnesses this day.” 11Then all the people who were at the gate, and the elders, said, “We are witnesses. May the Lord make the woman, who is coming into your house, like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel. May you prosper in Ephʹrathah and be renowned in Bethlehem; 12and may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah, because of the children that the Lord will give you by this young woman.”
13 So Boʹaz took Ruth and she became his wife; and he went in to her, and the Lord gave her conception, and she bore a son. 14Then the women said to Naʹomi, “Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without next of kin; and may his name be renowned in Israel! 15He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age; for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has borne him.” 16Then Naʹomi took the child and laid him in her bosom, and became his nurse. 17And the women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying, “A son has been born to Naʹomi.” They named him Obed; he was the father of Jesse, the father of David.
18 Now these are the descendants of Perez: Perez was the father of Hezron, 19Hezron of Ram, Ram of Amminʹadab, 20Amminʹadab of Nahshon, Nahshon of Salmon, 21Salmon of Boʹaz, Boʹaz of Obed, 22Obed of Jesse, and Jesse of David.
Güler Ates
Isimsiz, 2008, Archival Digital Print, 51 x 51 cm, Collection of the artist, © Guler Ates, courtesy of Bridgeman Images; Photo: courtesy of the artist
Mona Hatoum
Impenetrable, 2009, Steel and Nylon monofilament, 300 x 300 x 300 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Purchased with funds contributed by the Collections Council and the International Director's Council, with additional funds from Ann Ames, Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian, and Marcio Fainzilber, 2012, 2012.10, © Mona Hatoum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photo: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY
Ibrahim El-Salahi
The Oxford Tree, 2001, Pen, ink, and coloured ink on Bristol board, 34 x 34 cm, Private Collection, London, © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London; Photo: Courtesy of Vigo gallery and the artist
Transgression to Transformation
The brevity of the book of Ruth belies its significance. It offers an answer to some of the most important questions the people of Israel grapple with throughout the Old Testament. How are we to respond to outsiders? How should we understand and inhabit boundaries? Are we allowed to transgress them? Mona Hatoum, Güler Ates, and Ibrahim El Salahi grapple with similar questions in the contemporary context.
While its date is disputed, Ruth was written at a time of precarity. If authored before the Israelites’ sixth-century BCE experience of exile, this was because of threats to the Davidic monarchy. If post-exilic, this was because people were trying to come to terms with the profound trauma of forcible displacement.
Uncertainty and fear tend to provoke concern about identity and material resources, and an ongoing debate concerning how to respond to those defined as ‘other’ to Israel rumbles on behind this text. Who was to be included and given access to the holy places and rights to land, wealth, and power? Who should be legitimately excluded? How tightly were boundaries to be drawn between ‘us’—Israelites, the people of God—and ‘them’—the others, foreigners? Can we intermarry with outsiders or will they pollute and threaten us?
Two trajectories of response solidified over time. One urged exclusivity. We glimpse it in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, where intermarriage is condemned and foreigners are prohibited from entering the Temple. Another urged inclusivity. It encouraged care to be offered to the alien and hospitality to be showed to the stranger (e.g. Leviticus 19:33–34). It envisaged the mountain of the Lord being one to which all people and nations of the world would come and dwell together (Isaiah 55–56). The book of Ruth epitomizes this second strand.
Ruth—the book and the character—interrogates and transgresses borders. Borders create others, and Ruth is the ultimate outsider. She dwells on the wrong side of religious, cultural, and social boundaries of her time. Moab was considered to be an archenemy of Israel, as the Moabites had refused to help the people of Israel on their way to the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 23:4) and Moab was born through an incestuous relationship between Lot and his daughters (Genesis 19:36–37). Also, Ruth is a woman, and—what is more—a childless widow at a time when being barren was a sign of divine disfavour.
Hatoum’s Impenetrable evokes the stark inhospitality that outsiders like Ruth—past and present—must overcome. It is an inhospitality which eats away at the space it purports to protect even as it is projected outwards, for the barbed wire borders do not just demarcate the cube’s edges. They constitute the cube. Borders become, so to speak, all that the cube is. So too the costly navigation of—and tripping up on—hostile borders can imbue the lives of migrants long after the physical crossing of a particular nation state line is over. And this infects the lives and experience of non-migrants dwelling in these spaces too.
But Ruth transgresses boundaries to become an agent of transformation. Through bearing Obed, she brings joy to Boaz and fills Naomi’s emptiness (4:13–17) and Obed’s name, meaning serving, underlines his role in God’s salvific plan. Ruth also encourages Boaz, and through him the broader community of Israel, to enlarge his understanding of the Torah law concerning the role of the kinsman redeemer (go’el) and the inclusion of outsiders. As Bergant puts it:
The borders so menacingly evoked in Impenetrable—the vertical barbed wires that exclude and harm those that seek to pass by, over, or through them—turn metaphorically, then, into the life-giving vertical lines of El Salahi’s The Oxford Tree. His lines connect earth and heaven, transgressing the boundary between mundane and holy, to form the haraz tree that bursts with vivacity unexpectedly when all else has dried up around it. Just as El-Salahi’s tree fuses the vegetation and colours of Sudan with Western modernism—blending cultural, national, and aesthetic categories—so Ruth’s hybridity and boundary-crossing are the source of new life for Israel. She is like the woman in Ates’s Isimsiz. Resisting being fully known by others, Ruth’s gift begins with her otherness, courage, and movement. Both The Oxford Tree and Isimsiz suggest the strength and possibility that can come from without.
While human beings in their full subjectivity are noticeably absent from the three works of art, Ruth 3–4 is full of them. Fifty-five out of eighty-five verses in Ruth are spoken conversation, which is the highest proportion of dialogue to narrative in any biblical book (Sasson 1997: 320). Human relationship and conversation is where the key work of transgression towards transformation takes place. And it is through this presence of the characters to one another that God’s presence is made manifest.
References
Bergant, Dianne. 2003. ‘Ruth: The Migrant Who Saved the People’, in Migration, Religious Experience, and Globalization, ed. by G. Campese and P. Ciallella (New York: Center for Migration Studies), pp. 49–61
Sasson, Jack. 1997. ‘Ruth’, in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. by R. Alter and F. Kermode (London: Fontana), pp. 320–28
Ruth 3–4
Revised Standard Version
Ruth 3
3 Then Naʹomi her mother-in-law said to her, “My daughter, should I not seek a home for you, that it may be well with you? 2Now is not Boʹaz our kinsman, with whose maidens you were? See, he is winnowing barley tonight at the threshing floor. 3Wash therefore and anoint yourself, and put on your best clothes and go down to the threshing floor; but do not make yourself known to the man until he has finished eating and drinking. 4But when he lies down, observe the place where he lies; then, go and uncover his feet and lie down; and he will tell you what to do.” 5And she replied, “All that you say I will do.”
6 So she went down to the threshing floor and did just as her mother-in-law had told her. 7And when Boʹaz had eaten and drunk, and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of grain. Then she came softly, and uncovered his feet, and lay down. 8At midnight the man was startled, and turned over, and behold, a woman lay at his feet! 9He said, “Who are you?” And she answered, “I am Ruth, your maidservant; spread your skirt over your maidservant, for you are next of kin.” 10And he said, “May you be blessed by the Lord, my daughter; you have made this last kindness greater than the first, in that you have not gone after young men, whether poor or rich. 11And now, my daughter, do not fear, I will do for you all that you ask, for all my fellow townsmen know that you are a woman of worth. 12And now it is true that I am a near kinsman, yet there is a kinsman nearer than I. 13Remain this night, and in the morning, if he will do the part of the next of kin for you, well; let him do it; but if he is not willing to do the part of the next of kin for you, then, as the Lord lives, I will do the part of the next of kin for you. Lie down until the morning.”
14 So she lay at his feet until the morning, but arose before one could recognize another; and he said, “Let it not be known that the woman came to the threshing floor.” 15And he said, “Bring the mantle you are wearing and hold it out.” So she held it, and he measured out six measures of barley, and laid it upon her; then she went into the city. 16And when she came to her mother-in-law, she said, “How did you fare, my daughter?” Then she told her all that the man had done for her, 17saying, “These six measures of barley he gave to me, for he said, ‘You must not go back empty-handed to your mother-in-law.’ ” 18She replied, “Wait, my daughter, until you learn how the matter turns out, for the man will not rest, but will settle the matter today.”
4 And Boʹaz went up to the gate and sat down there; and behold, the next of kin, of whom Boʹaz had spoken, came by. So Boʹaz said, “Turn aside, friend; sit down here”; and he turned aside and sat down. 2And he took ten men of the elders of the city, and said, “Sit down here”; so they sat down. 3Then he said to the next of kin, “Naʹomi, who has come back from the country of Moab, is selling the parcel of land which belonged to our kinsman Elimʹelech. 4So I thought I would tell you of it, and say, Buy it in the presence of those sitting here, and in the presence of the elders of my people. If you will redeem it, redeem it; but if you will not, tell me, that I may know, for there is no one besides you to redeem it, and I come after you.” And he said, “I will redeem it.” 5Then Boʹaz said, “The day you buy the field from the hand of Naʹomi, you are also buying Ruth the Moabitess, the widow of the dead, in order to restore the name of the dead to his inheritance.” 6Then the next of kin said, “I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I impair my own inheritance. Take my right of redemption yourself, for I cannot redeem it.”
7 Now this was the custom in former times in Israel concerning redeeming and exchanging: to confirm a transaction, the one drew off his sandal and gave it to the other, and this was the manner of attesting in Israel. 8So when the next of kin said to Boʹaz, “Buy it for yourself,” he drew off his sandal. 9Then Boʹaz said to the elders and all the people, “You are witnesses this day that I have bought from the hand of Naʹomi all that belonged to Elimʹelech and all that belonged to Chilʹion and to Mahlon. 10Also Ruth the Moabitess, the widow of Mahlon, I have bought to be my wife, to perpetuate the name of the dead in his inheritance, that the name of the dead may not be cut off from among his brethren and from the gate of his native place; you are witnesses this day.” 11Then all the people who were at the gate, and the elders, said, “We are witnesses. May the Lord make the woman, who is coming into your house, like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel. May you prosper in Ephʹrathah and be renowned in Bethlehem; 12and may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah, because of the children that the Lord will give you by this young woman.”
13 So Boʹaz took Ruth and she became his wife; and he went in to her, and the Lord gave her conception, and she bore a son. 14Then the women said to Naʹomi, “Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without next of kin; and may his name be renowned in Israel! 15He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age; for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has borne him.” 16Then Naʹomi took the child and laid him in her bosom, and became his nurse. 17And the women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying, “A son has been born to Naʹomi.” They named him Obed; he was the father of Jesse, the father of David.
18 Now these are the descendants of Perez: Perez was the father of Hezron, 19Hezron of Ram, Ram of Amminʹadab, 20Amminʹadab of Nahshon, Nahshon of Salmon, 21Salmon of Boʹaz, Boʹaz of Obed, 22Obed of Jesse, and Jesse of David.
More Exhibitions
The Casting of Lots
Matthew 27:35–36; Mark 15:24; Luke 23:34; John 19:23–25a
David Plays the Harp for Saul
1 Samuel 16:14–23
The Wicked Tenants
Matthew 21:33–46; Mark 12:1–12; Luke 20:9–19